Ordinarily, neo-con's only cite one another.
In this case, fellow traveller Michael Rubin spotted this press release from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which notes how former Cold Warrior, UNOCAL employee, PNAC-member and Bush's Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, attended a pipeline opening ceremony earlier this month in Erbil, the capital city of Northern Iraq's semi-autonomous region.
"So, former U.S. government officials who didn't wait long to be involved in Iraqi Kurdish oil, be it directly or as brokers for other companies, appears to include Robert Blackwill, Dick Naab, Harry Schute, Jay Garner, and now Zalmay Khalilzad. Peter Galbraith as well, while not in the government, appears to have conflated his advocacy for Kurdish separatism with investment in Kurdish oil. In all cases, it might be legal, but the optics certainly are not good."
Rubin left out a few former officials of note - namely, another fellow traveller, Richard Perle; (Ret.) Lt. General Ronald Hite, Garner's business partner, who joins him as an adviser to or member of many military-industrial type board's of directors; and former undersecretary of the Army Joe Reeder, who (like Garner) has both lobbied for the KRG (evidently a growing vocation) and is an advisor to the Canadian company, Vast Exploration, which signed a potentially lucrative Production Sharing Contract with the KRG last year.
(Garner's ties to the KRG, Iraqi oil, and a Canadian business consortium were exposed last year by yours truly via Mother Jones.)
The particulars of Khalilzad's interests in the Iraqi oil sector are unclear at this point. He would be familiar, however, with the Kar Group, the company that will be investing $670 million over three phases to develop a 75,000 barrel-per-day capacity at the just-inaugurated Khurmala oil field (complete with an accompanying oil refinery, provided by Texas-based Ventech Engineers, Inc.). Although they appear to have deleted it from their newly updated website, the Kar Group once boasted that among their "major clients" were USAID, and private U.S. contractors Associates in Rural Development, Inc. (ARD, Inc.), Development Alternatives, Inc, (DAI), USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), Bearing Point, and Creative Associates International, Inc. (CAII).
The KAR Group has also collaborated in a joint venture with the mysterious Canadian oil company, OGI Group, developing the Hamrin oil field for the Iraq State Company for Oil Projects (SCOP).
Rubin's point that "the optics certainly are not good" struck me as interesting. As Foreign Policy's recent interview with Garner suggests, the optics couldn't be better for Garner. In an article that began with "Jay Garner knows Iraqi Kurdistan" (he was interviewed from the region) and delves into the matter of oil politics, it neither mentions that Garner is a lobbyist for the KRG, nor that he advises (and likely has shares in) a company that may soon be drilling for hugely profitable oil there.
As a good buddy of Obama's National Security Advisor Jim Jones, it's fascinating that Garner's activities in Iraq - which would seem to be made illegal under Congressman Dennis Kucinich's proposed H.R. 6710 - have generated such little scrutiny, let alone controversy. Perhaps all it will have taken is a neo-con sighting to rattle this cage.